Biography

Italian painter. He painted portraits, religious works and genre scenes and was one of the first Genoese painters to respond to the new art of Caravaggio. An unusually cultivated artist, educated and lively, he etched for pleasure, illustrated books and wrote poetry in the Genoese dialect. He moved in literary circles and knew the poet Gabrielle Chiabrera; he also knew aristocrats such as Gian Carlo Doria, his first patron, and Giacomo Lomellini (1586-1660).

Borzone trained first with his uncle, Filippo Bartolotto, a modest portrait painter, and later in the workshop of Cesare Corte (1550-c. 1613); he was also attracted to the art of Giovanni Battista Paggi (1554-1627) and Bernardo Castello (1557-1629). It may have been through Corte, a collector and dealer in Venetian art, that Borzone studied the works of Titian, Veronese and the Bassani, who were to influence the quiet naturalism of his mature art. He acted as adviser to Doria over the purchase of paintings, and in this capacity travelled to Milan in the second half of 1614; it was a journey of crucial importance to his career and to the formation of his style. In Milan he was brilliantly successful as a portrait painter and was deeply impressed by the works of the Milanese artists Giulio Cesare Procaccini and, above all, Cerano.

He continued to paint portraits and portrait miniatures after his return to Genoa. Two paintings, both Portrait of a Man (Galleria Sabauda, Turin; private collection), are now attributed to Borzone. The Venetian influence is strong in such early works as the Baptism (1620-21; Palazzo Bianco, Genoa), which was inspired by Veronese and admired by Orazio Gentileschi during his stay in Genoa (1623), and the more broadly painted Virgin and Child with St Bernard (1629; San Gerolamo di Quarto, Genoa), Borzone's next dated work.

Borzone's chronology remains uncertain, but the St Francis in Ecstasy (Accademia Albertina, Turin) and the Stigmatization of St Francis (Conservatorio Suore di San Giuseppe, Genoa), which are indebted both to Venetian art and to Cerano, are probably youthful works, while a date in the 1620s has been proposed for a group of pictures.

In the 1630s Borzone was influenced by the art of Caravaggio. He had perhaps visited Rome and encountered the master's work there, but it is more likely that he had seen the works of Bartolomeo Manfredi and Valentin de Boulogne, who were followers of Caravaggio, in Genoese collections. In such mature works as the Adoration of the Shepherds (Pinacoteca Civica, Savona), which may be placed in the early 1630s, and in the dated Ecce homo (1637, private collection), Borzone abandoned the complex structure of late Mannerist painting and, inspired by Caravaggio, developed a new simplicity and clarity, conveying emotion with warmth and intensity.

There are two dated works from the 1640s, the Martyrdom of St Barbara (1643; Parish church, Loano, Savona) and the Adoration of the Shepherds (1645; SS Annunziata del Vastato, Genoa), his most fully Caravaggesque work.

While painting the Adoration of the Shepherds Borzone fell from the scaffold and died, and his sons, Giovanni Battista and Carlo, were left to complete it.